Erroneous

I still believe Chrono Trigger is the best RPG of all time. I used to be sad that I had only played it on an emulator, but it'll be great playing it on a DS!

Yeah I'm pretty sure you can mod an xbox controller to be more like an arcade joystick/buttons. But then again, since the 360 is out it might be a hell of a lot easier and pretty cheap to buy one made for the xbox, though if memory serves me it would have a different device code when you plug it in via usb and you might have to tell Linux to load the driver for it. So the question then becomes whether you want to do more work on hardware or software. A quick Google search did reveal this. Also, I did the Mech Assault mod and it cost me about $7 plus a few phone calls to various retailers to get the right disc. You can also check the versions of it at your local Blockbuster since you only need to do it once. You'll also need one of those memory cards for the Xbox and connect a USB controller to the PC and use Action Replay to load the save file to it. Alternatively you could rewire the controller to have a USB port to plug in one of the right kind of thumb drives. There are plenty of guides for that stuff.

If you are any good at tearing up old electronics and tinkering then you could always take an Xbox controller (original, dunno about 360 ones), mod a usb plug for it (the controller works out of the box in the couple Linux distros I used, but you'll need whatever xf86-input-joystick package installed). If you want it to be all prettified then simply wire up the arcade buttons to the connects for the xbox controller. I believe this is about what they did on Hak.5 only with a PS2 controller if I remember correctly. Also, if you want you could easily do a soft mod on the original xbox, throw xmame on there, and go to town. I did that and I know you can get xbox's for like $50 at most these days. If you want more than 12 GB then you'll want to go through the lengthy and painful process of swapping out the xbox hard drive with an IDE one. Hard mods often make that part easy though.

Not too bad, at least not at breaking anything up to 3 characters long. I don't know python but if it is like C and most languages that say print then it looks like it will all be printed out on one single line. This could actually be a good thing if you remake your code to be more robust (using a function passed the min and max number of characters that the password or string is). You could even do it recursively in probably about 6 lines at that point and just print out the newline character(s) at the end of the recursive statement. If you are attempting to print out possible passwords to decrypt something like a rar file, I'd use crark. I've used it before and it worked very nicely for the file I was using with a password that was in my dictionary file.

Well since almost all my college courses I've had so far are in C, I do recommend it. C++ is nice, but if you aren't doing any OOP there really isn't a need for it even though it doesn't force you into objects like C# or Java. Also, if you learn C then you can very easily transition into C++. Java is pretty good as well, and there are compilers you can use that make actual exe's that don't rely on the Java VM. If you simply want scripting, try the Shell scripting language used in Linux. I believe you can execute a shell script if you have cygwin installed using sh.exe or bash.exe. Be sure to have the full path for the used commands like ls unless you plan on putting the cygwin bin directory in your PATH. This is more complicated to get working than BAT or VBS but it does work quite well in porting over to Linux. If you want an antiquated scripting language that works on all windows machines, there's always BAT files...but you can't get very complicated with these. Also, you can use Visual Basic and make .vbs files. Still is scripting so it doesn't require a compiler and you can do most of the things you want to do, though I haven't made a vbs in years.

I kinda like Defcon (relatively quick RTS, no plot though). I know there are Civ ports and using Cedega I'm sure you can get all kinds of decent windows RTS games running. That may be the way to go if you're looking for a pay game since they are easier to find for Windows. Other than that, there's usually about 4-10 games under the strategy category for KDE (at least using KDE-mod for archlinux with the kdemod-kde-games group). Other than that, you can always fire up an emulator and play some good GBA strategy games like Advance Wars even though that particular one isn't a RTS. After some google-ing for linux games I think I'm going to check out Epiar (space adventure).

I think the main point I'm trying to make is that while coding tools are handy, and great for a production environment, it is still necessary for programmers to actually learn how to program with actual text. It is like saying "Why does anybody draw these days when you could easily do a Google Image search and find something that does what you want?". I know the tools are very handy, and can bring about a quick fix for IT staff, but there is more to computer science than IT. Maybe someday programmers will be like English and Math teachers in that all they do is teach or maybe get lucky with a really cool job, but I don't see that happening today.

Sorry if I was too mean earlier. The truth is that programmers are taught how to flow chart a program because it is a great way to get an idea out. It is kind of like pseudo code in that it really helps you figure out the correct structure for code. The only problem is that flow charts are not as robust as actual code. You can't show very much except for the decision making process. It is kind of like the reason they actually teach how to make linked lists, and how to sort data structures. Sure most languages have an array and a linked list structure that have a fairly fast routine to sort. This sorting method doesn't really work for structs and multidimensional arrays (depending on how it is done) and isn't going to be the fastest method every time. So while yes, you don't really have to code a linked list or sorting algorithm, it might make your program faster and maybe possibly a more elegant solution if you do.

And what is the deal with people who still type in whole sentences and spell out words? I mean HELLO! We invented txt spk for a reason! It is so much easier and it isn't like we really need to be anything more than vague meme zombies anyway.

I actually saw this when I first started using the Maps API since I had an address I wanted to convert to coordinates. The only thing I need really is kind of a smart filter for each craig's list page so that I can get the address to put into the geocoder. If it finds a match for the address(es) that the filter comes up with, I'll put the coordinates and street address into a database, along with the description, and have it show up on the page. As I said I could make my own algorithm to go through each word in the description and title, but I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, especially since the wheel that is there is probably already refined from various problems it came across.

I'm looking into building an application on my site that goes through garage sales listings from Craig's List and strips out the addresses from postings and then displays them on a google map. I know I won't be able to interpret something like "Off of A Rd and B Rd. Follow signs.", but that is OK. Anyone know of some code for finding an address from a block of text? If not I plan on looking through the listings for a number followed by some words and then followed by either a zip, punctuation mark, new line, city, or city and state and then searching for it in google maps. Not sure if someone has already developed this but I'm sure spammers have dozens of crawlers that do exactly this. Eventually if this works, I may even add in a thing to nab the date listed for the garage sale searching for day of week names and maybe using logic and spelling correctors to figure out a date out of a string of text like "firday after next".

Hey, I was waxing 3 years nostalgic and wanted to redownload FTS since I have lost my episodes long ago. I can find all except Box 04 on google video but the quality is...lacking. Anyone have 1-6 on a mirror somewhere or willing to upload it to me?

A layman's way of looking at it: A compiled program is like a person directly talking to a person operating a crane. You tell them to move, they move fairly quickly, but you might not always speak the same language as the operator. An interpreted program is like talking to a translator and the translator talking to the crane operator. The extra level of interpretation makes it so that if you have a good enough translator, you can talk to any crane operator, but it will take a little longer to get the job done. Luckily there are compilers for certain cross-platform and interpreted languages (python and Java through gcj for instance) that "pre-translate" everything ahead of time making your code run quite a bit faster.

Interesting. What about another U3 script that disables default security threats in Windows (i.e. LM Hash) so that when you go to your mom's house you can secure all their computers (a little) rather easily

Yeah, I suppose the question was more about IM protocols. I'm pretty sure AIM allows the IM client to tell the connecting client what port to connect to (at least that is the way Gaim makes it sound).

My first distro was Debian a couple years ago. Wow that was a lot of work. If you are committed to learning Linux, I recommend a distro like Archlinux. It has a lot of good support through IRC, forums, but firstly the Wiki, including a lot of guides. It is essentially like Gentoo compiled for i686. By looking through install guides and howtos, you will learn more about Linux and will be more apt to debug problems you get. If you don't think you can handle command line or just want something to get Linux up and mostly running though, pick something easier like an Ubuntu flavor. I prefer Kubuntu because I like KDE (which is more Windows-like than Gnome).

for the most part, the only reason to open up those ports (incoming) would be to allow users to receive pictures/files. Since there are ways around this (email, imageshack) that have plenty of server-side scanners for malware, etc, I'd say don't do it. If it is a personal environment that you have complete control over, do what you'd like. Out of curiosity, does anyone know if using a client like Gaim or Trillian lowers the number of ports you have to open up for receiving if you use multiple clients? We know it saves memory, if nothng else.

*pokes eyes out with a spork*

heh, no worries. It was rather long-winded anyway.

I use XBMC, though I haven't tried to use it for an OGM file yet. Should work though since it uses mplayer, which is what I use anyway. For making the ogm file, I use dvd2ogm which lets me set things like how I want to do the audio (mp3, ogg, or just mux it in) and what codec to use. Like I said, I go all open source with ogg audio and xvid.

Divx is only the video codec. The reason I use xvid and ogg audio instead of the standard divx and mp3 is that they are both open source. Ogm is the container, as opposed to avi, mkv, mp4, or mpg to name a few. Mkv and ogm seem fairly similar, though mkv tends to be a bit more popular from what I've seen. They both support chapters, multiple audio, and multiple subtitles. They seem to have been made for DVDs. You still need a player that supports all their features though to make use of them. Mplayer and Media Player Classic both work fine though.

I do about the same thing, only I like to rip to ogm because it has chapter support, multi-audio support, and subtitles. I believe Matroska has about the same thing though. In Windows, I use RipIt4Me, and then use dvd2ogm to rip it to an ogm. On my laptop with the CPU limited to about 500 MHz because of heating issues, it takes about 3 times the length of the movie from rip to encoding to copying over to my file server. I also use an Xvid 2 pass setup with a file size somewhere between 1 GB and 1.4 GB. If it is more compressable (old movies/shows like Monty Python) it shrinks it down some more. Works for me.

Yeah, e17's analog clock is without dots, numbers, and is way too small. I put it on the wiki and it uses Festival and no files: http://www.hak5.org/wiki/TimeToSpeech

I didn't want to use files either but I was too lazy to read the man page for flite. If I put it in the wiki, I'll make sure to change it to festival too.

I use mythtv. I use e17. Neither of which have a very good system for quickly seeing what time it is. Solution: have a voice tell you what time it is by pressing Alt+T, and date by pressing Alt+D. Here's how: copy this code to a file called time.sh: case "$1" in time) date "+ %l %M %p" | sed -e "s/00//g" | sed -e 's/ 0/ oh /g' | sed -e 's/AM/a-m/g' > .temp ;; date) date "+ %A, %B %dth" | sed "s/1th/1st/g" | sed "s/2th/2nd/g" | sed "s/3th/3rd/g" > .temp ;; *) date "+ %A, %B %dth" | sed "s/1th/1st/g" | sed "s/2th/2nd/g" | sed "s/3th/3rd/g" > .temp date "+ %l %M %p" | sed -e 's/ 0/ oh /g' | sed -e 's/AM/a-m/g' >> .temp ;; esac cat .temp flite .temp -o .temp.wav aplay -t wav .temp.wav &>/dev/null rm .temp rm .temp.wav Install the following: alsa-utils, flite. You want to have aplay or play commands, along with flite. Then add the appropiate lines to whatever keybinding configs you have for your window manager run "sh ~/time.sh time" and "sh ~/time.sh date" when you press Alt+T and Alt+D, respectively. Here's the lines for fluxbox: Mod1 t :ExecCommand sh ~/time.sh time Mod1 d :ExecCommand sh ~/time.sh date Restart/Reload your window manager and turn up your properly alsa-configured speakers to test it out.